Conceptual Art
Posted: Sun Oct 06, 2024 11:35 pm
Douglas Mercer
October 6 2024
Purveyors of Conceptual Art believe that it’s all in the head, that the physical manifestation of art is gauche, that only plebeians stoop to such expedients. That is for any art form, be it a painting, a sculpture, a written work, or a song, the artist should just write a kind of White Paper describing the work, in effect writing a critical piece about the fantasy work so detailed that the acute listener can manifest it in his head or in reality should he feel the need to deign to. Thus both the artist and the audience would save inordinate amounts of time so more and more art could be created by this ground plan or blueprint method. After all if we are one man learning as Pascal said, or if we have an oversoul as Emerson posited, time is of the essence in our endeavor to figure out the symbols, and time is a-wasting and art, with its extravagant and mostly pointless elaborations, is not helping any.
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to American artist Sol LeWitt's definition of conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print.
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
For instance instead of taking the seven years to write Ulysses or the seventeen years to write Finnegan’s Wake Joyce could have tossed out a short essay on each in a few days time saying, essentially, that Ulysses is about a young man given to pride who realized that the salt of the earth Jew is closer to the truth. He could have spent an extra day or so outlining all the correspondences to the Odyssey and the parts of the body, and given a précis of the main characters in outline, and how Molly is mother earth taking out the punctuation like so many hair pins upon retiring for the night, and the Eternal Feminine is, of all things, eternal. For the second book he could have just anticipated Heidegger by saying that all human languages constitute together a unified field of signs which, when integrated and interpreted aright, lead to total consciousness. This would have saved us all the trouble of reading those two turgid tomes and he might have gone further in his really very interesting theory of language and shown how it operated in the moving field of history. Then about 1923 or so he might have began to putter around the house a bit or sang in that fine tenor voice of his, and seen if he had in fact ran out of gas.
For instance in Ulysses there is a “man in the Macintosh” who keeps showing up at odd points in the narrative and thousands upon thousands of English Lit professors have got fat sinecures from assessing who this man in the Macintosh might indeed be, with conclusions ranging from who knows, to that it’s a MacGuffin or a lacunae in the text meant to suggest indeterminacy or some sort or non repeating pattern or a metaphorical halting problem. Unless it was just a lark presumably Joyce knew the meaning of the man in the Macintosh and he might just as well have told us in a few phrases and told us what the ramifications of it were. As it was he cultivated for his poor self a great aura of artistic genius and baffling mystery which kept the insomniacs up at night ad infinitum. Which was fine for him but never did a thing for me.
***
Notes:
MacGuffin: Macintosh
Paul McCartney is affectionately known as Mac among his friends.
The Mackintosh raincoat (abbreviated as mac) is a form of waterproof raincoat, first sold in 1824, made of rubberized fabric. The Mackintosh is named after its Scottish inventor Charles Macintosh, although many writers added a letter k. The variant spelling of "Mackintosh" is now standard. Although the Mackintosh coat style has become generic, a genuine Mackintosh coat is made from rubberized or rubber laminated material.
The reason mystery novels are satisfying is simple: we want to know who did it. Not only do we want to know who did it, but we want to know what it is that they did, how they came to do it, and why, and when, and where. Mysteries have a nice arc. They take us, in the most basic sense, from a lack of knowledge to some fulfillment of knowledge. They give us an answer. They fill the void with uncomplicated facts: “It was Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick.” Amongst this seeming infinity of minute mysteries in the text, there is perhaps no greater mystery than the question of the identity of the so-called “man in the macintosh.” In the 94 years since the book’s publication, Joyce scholars have written innumerable words arguing for and against various answers to this question. “Where the deuce did he pop out of?” Bloom wonders. “He wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear.” The ghostly presence, at first, seems like it could possibly all be in Bloom’s head—since much of the novel plays out in the stream of his consciousness
Golly, whatten tunket's yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at his wearables. By mighty! What's he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by James. Wants it real bad. D'ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis. Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once a prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies. Pardon? Seen him today at a runefal? Chum o' yourn passed in his checks?
We are not told who has "Seen him today at a runefal"––though Bloom seems the only likely candidate––but clearly this is the same man spotted in the cemetery. A discreet "Peep at his wearables" shows that he is "tattered and torn" like the man in the nursery rhyme. His socks are thread-"bare," and his coat looks like he has been walking down long "Dusty Rhodes." Gifford identifies a person of this name as "an American comic-strip character from about 1900, the tramp who weathers continuous comic misfortune," and he suggests that the following moniker, "Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon," echoes the titles of "American dime-novel Westerns." In a JJON note, John Simpson supports Gifford's gloss, observing that the Dusty Rhodes character began to appear in American newspapers around 1891 and in cartoons several years later, including some in a British comic magazine called Illustrated Chips which was stocked by the Dublin newsagent Tallon's in 1898.
Standing in the dock at Southampton
Trying to get to Holland or France
The man in the mac said you've got to go back
You know they didn't even give us a chance
On the corner is a banker with a motorcar
And little children laugh at him behind his back
And the banker never wears a Mac in the pouring rain
Very strange
McIntosh: an apple
Macintosh is a computer known colloquially as a Mac.
Apple Corporation (ie, apple corp) was the business run by the Beatles and their various hangers on
Some posit that God should have been a Conceptual Artist, simply revealing his Ur-plan to the spirits being molded and modeled in the workshop, rather than creating the world with its inevitable imperfections and disappointments. But then as the Hebrews say he created it in six and rested on the seventh, though a jaundiced viewer would perhaps have suggested that he could have slogged on through the weekend; I work every day come rain or shine after all, and as far as I know no one is worshipping me.
October 6 2024
Purveyors of Conceptual Art believe that it’s all in the head, that the physical manifestation of art is gauche, that only plebeians stoop to such expedients. That is for any art form, be it a painting, a sculpture, a written work, or a song, the artist should just write a kind of White Paper describing the work, in effect writing a critical piece about the fantasy work so detailed that the acute listener can manifest it in his head or in reality should he feel the need to deign to. Thus both the artist and the audience would save inordinate amounts of time so more and more art could be created by this ground plan or blueprint method. After all if we are one man learning as Pascal said, or if we have an oversoul as Emerson posited, time is of the essence in our endeavor to figure out the symbols, and time is a-wasting and art, with its extravagant and mostly pointless elaborations, is not helping any.
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work are prioritized equally to or more than traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. This method was fundamental to American artist Sol LeWitt's definition of conceptual art, one of the first to appear in print.
In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
For instance instead of taking the seven years to write Ulysses or the seventeen years to write Finnegan’s Wake Joyce could have tossed out a short essay on each in a few days time saying, essentially, that Ulysses is about a young man given to pride who realized that the salt of the earth Jew is closer to the truth. He could have spent an extra day or so outlining all the correspondences to the Odyssey and the parts of the body, and given a précis of the main characters in outline, and how Molly is mother earth taking out the punctuation like so many hair pins upon retiring for the night, and the Eternal Feminine is, of all things, eternal. For the second book he could have just anticipated Heidegger by saying that all human languages constitute together a unified field of signs which, when integrated and interpreted aright, lead to total consciousness. This would have saved us all the trouble of reading those two turgid tomes and he might have gone further in his really very interesting theory of language and shown how it operated in the moving field of history. Then about 1923 or so he might have began to putter around the house a bit or sang in that fine tenor voice of his, and seen if he had in fact ran out of gas.
For instance in Ulysses there is a “man in the Macintosh” who keeps showing up at odd points in the narrative and thousands upon thousands of English Lit professors have got fat sinecures from assessing who this man in the Macintosh might indeed be, with conclusions ranging from who knows, to that it’s a MacGuffin or a lacunae in the text meant to suggest indeterminacy or some sort or non repeating pattern or a metaphorical halting problem. Unless it was just a lark presumably Joyce knew the meaning of the man in the Macintosh and he might just as well have told us in a few phrases and told us what the ramifications of it were. As it was he cultivated for his poor self a great aura of artistic genius and baffling mystery which kept the insomniacs up at night ad infinitum. Which was fine for him but never did a thing for me.
***
Notes:
MacGuffin: Macintosh
Paul McCartney is affectionately known as Mac among his friends.
The Mackintosh raincoat (abbreviated as mac) is a form of waterproof raincoat, first sold in 1824, made of rubberized fabric. The Mackintosh is named after its Scottish inventor Charles Macintosh, although many writers added a letter k. The variant spelling of "Mackintosh" is now standard. Although the Mackintosh coat style has become generic, a genuine Mackintosh coat is made from rubberized or rubber laminated material.
The reason mystery novels are satisfying is simple: we want to know who did it. Not only do we want to know who did it, but we want to know what it is that they did, how they came to do it, and why, and when, and where. Mysteries have a nice arc. They take us, in the most basic sense, from a lack of knowledge to some fulfillment of knowledge. They give us an answer. They fill the void with uncomplicated facts: “It was Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick.” Amongst this seeming infinity of minute mysteries in the text, there is perhaps no greater mystery than the question of the identity of the so-called “man in the macintosh.” In the 94 years since the book’s publication, Joyce scholars have written innumerable words arguing for and against various answers to this question. “Where the deuce did he pop out of?” Bloom wonders. “He wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear.” The ghostly presence, at first, seems like it could possibly all be in Bloom’s head—since much of the novel plays out in the stream of his consciousness
Golly, whatten tunket's yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at his wearables. By mighty! What's he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by James. Wants it real bad. D'ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis. Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once a prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies. Pardon? Seen him today at a runefal? Chum o' yourn passed in his checks?
We are not told who has "Seen him today at a runefal"––though Bloom seems the only likely candidate––but clearly this is the same man spotted in the cemetery. A discreet "Peep at his wearables" shows that he is "tattered and torn" like the man in the nursery rhyme. His socks are thread-"bare," and his coat looks like he has been walking down long "Dusty Rhodes." Gifford identifies a person of this name as "an American comic-strip character from about 1900, the tramp who weathers continuous comic misfortune," and he suggests that the following moniker, "Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon," echoes the titles of "American dime-novel Westerns." In a JJON note, John Simpson supports Gifford's gloss, observing that the Dusty Rhodes character began to appear in American newspapers around 1891 and in cartoons several years later, including some in a British comic magazine called Illustrated Chips which was stocked by the Dublin newsagent Tallon's in 1898.
Standing in the dock at Southampton
Trying to get to Holland or France
The man in the mac said you've got to go back
You know they didn't even give us a chance
On the corner is a banker with a motorcar
And little children laugh at him behind his back
And the banker never wears a Mac in the pouring rain
Very strange
McIntosh: an apple
Macintosh is a computer known colloquially as a Mac.
Apple Corporation (ie, apple corp) was the business run by the Beatles and their various hangers on
Some posit that God should have been a Conceptual Artist, simply revealing his Ur-plan to the spirits being molded and modeled in the workshop, rather than creating the world with its inevitable imperfections and disappointments. But then as the Hebrews say he created it in six and rested on the seventh, though a jaundiced viewer would perhaps have suggested that he could have slogged on through the weekend; I work every day come rain or shine after all, and as far as I know no one is worshipping me.
